Introduction to Ansible Development Tools

Welcome to the Introduction to Ansible Development Tools!

Overview

The Introduction to Ansible Development Tools provides a comprehensive, hands-on learning experience for understanding the developer flow for automation content.

Through a series of progressive labs, you’ll gain practical experience with:

  • Create - Covers automation content creation

  • Test - Covers automation content testing

  • Deploy - Covers automation content deployment

Prerequisites

Before starting this lab, ensure you have:

  • Basic understanding of Linux command line operations

  • Familiarity with VS Code

  • Basic Ansible and YAML syntax understanding

  • Access to the Red Hat Demo Platform environment

Lab structure

The following modules are included in this lab:

  1. Introduction

  2. Create

    1. Lab 1.1 - Creating a Collection with the VS Code Extension

    2. Lab 1.2 - Using the Ansible Development Environment tool (ade)

    3. Lab 1.3 - Adding a Module to a Collection

  3. Test

    1. Lab 2.1 - Testing a Collection with Ansible Molecule

    2. Lab 2.2 - Functional testing with pytest-ansible

    3. Lab 2.3 - Orchestrating Tests with tox-ansible

  4. Deploy

    1. Lab 3.1 - Creating an Execution Environment with ansible-builder

    2. Lab 3.2 - Introducing supply chain security with ansible-sign

  5. Conclusion

Learning outcomes

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

  • Use the Ansible extension for VS Code features for a rich editing experience.

  • Learn all the creation tools, including ansible-creator to scaffold new collections and content, adt (Ansible development tools) for a unified command-line tools management, ade (Ansible development environment) for managing collection dependencies and virtual environments and ansible-navigator for a feature-rich terminal-based user interface to run and test your execution environments..

  • Test your content with ansible-lint for checking playbooks against recommended practices, molecule for testing your collections in isolated, reproducible environments, pytest-ansible for functional testing of your modules, and tox-ansible for bringing it all together in multiple combinations.

  • Deploy to production by packaging your Collection content with ansible-galaxy and ansible-builder, and applying secure supply chain practices with ansible-sign.

Getting started

Begin with Introduction to start your adventure. Each module includes detailed instructions, code examples, and verification steps.

For questions or issues, refer to the Appendix or contact your instructor.